Change Passports: A Machine-Readable Standard for Auditable Artifact Promotion in Continually-Learning Agents

Continually-learning enterprise agents promote artifacts — memories, skills, adapters, policies — on the fly, yet what changed, why, on what evidence, and how to roll it back are recorded (if at all) in free-form logs no downstream system can read. We propose the change passport: a machine-readable record accompanying every artifact promotion, capturing provenance, mechanism, evidence, risk, dependencies, and rollback in a fixed schema shared across artifact classes. It corresponds structurally to the policy-supersession decision of Companion C [Anonymous, 2026] and plugs into existing audit and incident-response workflows (NIST-CSF-2.0, OWASP Agentic Top-10). We evaluate it two ways: (i) retroactive application to 160 promotion events from 3 companion evidence corpora, measuring field-presence (fields the reference validator populates from original telemetry) and judgment share (fields the schema author fills by adjudication); (ii) a deterministic incident drill against an engineered lineage-only (OpenLineage+MLflow) baseline. Both drill arms are literals fixed at freeze, so its recovery gap is a construction property: it establishes sufficiency to prescribe recovery in three scenario templates, not empirical advantage. Falsification was pre-registered at freeze on the two measured metrics: positive requires field-presence >= 25% AND judgment share <= 50%; retraction at field-presence <5% OR judgment share >75%; in-between is inconclusive. We observe 75.39% field-presence and 18.75% judgment share — clearing both bars — while 0 of 160 events clear full conformance, for three reasons: priorstateref, which no corpus recorded, plus blast_radius and dependencies, whose empty-by-design defaults the schema calls meaningful yet its own conformance rule counts as absent — a specification defect we diagnose rather than patch. This holds across all three corpora, two artifact classes and both mechanisms exercised. Labeller disclosure: the reconstructor is the schema author (per-field judgment invocations logged); blinded third-party replication is out of scope for this freeze. Companion C [Anonymous, 2026] is a concurrent anonymous CLEA submission consuming one passport instantiation; overlap is deliberate and narrow.